Eli Lake: Washed Up Hack Keeps Vomiting Up Copy, Sucking

I once wrote, somewhere, that Eli Lake is not responsible for being ugly. But he is responsible for being fat and stupid. You decide.

He’s also responsible for being a tool of various right-wing, mainly Zionist sources, which I’ve written about a few times in the past.

I haven’t written about Lake in a long time and rarely think about him. In fact, the only reason I suffer the nausea that inevitably follows thinking about Lake — OMG, imagine him naked — is that people send me stories he writes.

For example, just an hour ago or so an anonymous source who goes by the name of “No Friend of Eli” emailed me this pathetic story. I haven’t read all of it — actually, I’m only now about to get past the first paragraph — but NFoE wrote:

I’m wondering if this is just an early salvo of a coordinated right-wing effort to go after Rod Rosenstein. I frankly don’t even understand his rationale in this article, even within the context of a right-wing hack commentator and his frames of reference. It looks like a warm-up article for whatever Lindsay Graham has in store for Rosenstein in his upcoming hearing — no doubt a sober, diligent pursuit of the Truth.

Two years ago, following the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, a number of journalists wrote dramatic accounts of the Al Qaeda leader’s last moments. One such story, co-authored by Eli Lake in the Washington Times, cited Obama administration officials and an unnamed military source, described how bin Laden had “reached for a weapon to try to defend himself” during the intense firefight at his compound, and then “was shot by Navy SEALs after trying to use a woman reputed to be his wife as a human shield.”

It was exciting stuff, but it turned out to have been fictitious propaganda concocted by U.S. authorities to destroy bin Laden’s image in the eyes of his followers. Based on what we know now, the SEALs met virtually no resistance at the compound, there was no firefight, bin Laden didn’t use a woman as a human shield, and he was unarmed.

The White House blamed the misleading early reports on the “fog of war,” but as Will Saletan pointed out in Slate, “A fog of war creates confusion, not a consistent story like the one about the human shield. The reason U.S. officials bought and sold this story is that it fit their larger indictment of Bin Laden. It reinforced the shameful picture of him hiding in a mansion while sending others to fight and die. It made him look like a coward.”

Many reporters uncritically rushed the government’s account into print. For Lake, though, it fit a career pattern of credulously planting dubious stories from sources with strong political agendas.